Not Applicable.
Not Applicable.
The present invention relates in general to telephony voice mail systems, and, more specifically, to a system for managing voice messages within a mailbox for a particular user.
Conventional voice mail systems create a mailbox for a person associated with a called telephone number (i.e., the mailbox account xe2x80x9cownerxe2x80x9d). When incoming calls are unanswered within a certain number of rings, they are directed to a voice mail server allowing the caller to create a recorded message to be later retrieved by the owner. The owner can typically access their mailbox either from the called telephone or remotely from other telephones in order to manage the mailbox (e.g., record a personal greeting), to review message details (e.g., day and time of message), to listen to messages, and to delete messages. The owner is required to enter a valid pincode or password in order to gain access to the mailbox.
It has been recognized that as time passes, any unretrieved messages may become superfluous or no longer accurate. When new information becomes available, the party who left a prior message may decide to make the new information available to the mailbox owner by calling and leaving an additional message. Since two messages would then be in the mailbox, and since the older, inaccurate message would typically be played back first when the owner retrieves messages, inefficiency and confusion result. U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,351, issued to Carleton et al, discloses a voice mail system wherein a sender of a message who is an authorized user of the voice mail system can access stored messages in a recipient""s mailbox that were originally recorded by the sender. If so authorized, the sender is allowed to re-prioritize or delete messages in the recipient""s mailbox that have not yet been retrieved. A sender""s login information is compared to recorded message header information so that only messages left from the sender""s own telephone extension can be accessed.
As caller mobility increases, a caller does not necessarily make every call attempt to the mailbox owner from the same telephone number. Therefore, it may be desirable to access and re-prioritize messages with different message header information, which is not possible in the system shown in Carleton et al.
This increased caller mobility results, in part, from the increased use of mobile wireless devices such as cellular telephones, PDA""s, and other handheld devices. When the account owner uses a cellular telephone to retrieve messages, for example, costs may be incurred for each minute of connection time and the charge held in the portable battery of the phone is depleted to some extent. Connection minutes and battery charge are unnecessarily consumed whenever obsolete messages are retrieved.
When retrieving messages from an electronic mailbox, the messages are typically presented in chronological order. In Carleton et al, the message sender has the ability to re-order or re-prioritize the messages they have sent. Such re-prioritization does not involve messages of other senders. Thus, during retrieval of messages as known in the prior art, messages are played in an order assumes the mailbox owner""s priority to be to listen to the oldest messages first. However, it is possible or even likely that more important messages will not be accessed until lesser important messages have been reviewed, thereby requiring a cellular phone user to expend connect time and battery charge in a potentially wasteful manner.
The present invention has the advantages of increasing voice mail system flexibility in accessing previous messages by one caller from multiple telephone locations, increasing overall productivity of voice mail system users, allowing a mailbox owner to prioritize the playing of recorded messages, and minimizing connection time and battery consumption of portable, handheld devices. These advantages are achieved by a mailbox system wherein sub-mailboxes are created within the account owner""s mailbox such that a caller designates an access pincode for the sub-mailbox and then has access to the sub-mailbox for leaving messages, deleting messages, and re-ordering messages.
In one aspect of the invention, a method is provided for processing an incoming telephone call to a called telephone number from a caller at a calling telephone number wherein the incoming telephone call is directed to a target mailbox in a voice mail system and the target mailbox includes sub-mailboxes for containing recorded messages. A sub-mailbox is selected for access by the caller during the incoming telephone call. Access by the caller to the selected sub-mailbox is authorized in response to the caller inputting a valid sub-mailbox pincode corresponding to the selected sub-mailbox. An action from a group of actions is selected including a new message action for leaving a new recorded message in the selected sub-mailbox and a message delete action for deleting an existing message stored in the selected sub-mailbox. Then the selected action is executed.